


wherever i am

by miuyi (rainiest)



Category: EXO (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-05 15:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10311866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainiest/pseuds/miuyi
Summary: Seulgi falls in love. The world keeps spinning.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [kpopolymfics2017](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2017) collection. 



> **warnings:** mentioned smoking, language, alcohol, mentions of past baekhyun/taeyeon and member departures from exo, activities of questionable safety involving heights
> 
> infinite thanks and love to all of team canon, and extra gratitude to h as always, team maknae n, and captain hedgehog aka the mod of the century for the read-throughs and advice. thank you thank you thank you, seulgi/baekhyun??in this economy????.doc wouldn’t exist without you guys
> 
> the title is from an english translation of [cool world](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KL1BNIOVLc) by red velvet. the whole lyric is:
> 
> _Wherever I am, if it’s you_   
>  _I’ll save a spot right here_
> 
> edit july 2017: several months after writing this i've FINALLY found the perfect song to go with this fic (cool world comes a close second though). so if you like to listen to music while you read i'd recommend [sleep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qrK6IxWu2Q) by azure ray
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> This fic was written for K-Pop Olymfics 2017. Olymfics is a challenge in which participants write fics based on prompt sets and compete against other teams of writers, organized by genre. 
> 
> This is Team Canon’s fic for the following prompt set:  
>  **Winner – "Sentimental"**  
> [lyrics](https://colorcodedlyrics.com/2016/01/winner-sentimental-senchihae) | [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV9NJGTLm-4) | [supplementary](https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/wang_wei/8455784548) [prompts](https://66.media.tumblr.com/7c9d1e4d1e88e3244329429a0f6c2609/tumblr_oh4ha6h6pW1v9m0i0o1_500.jpg)
> 
> The other 2 fics for this prompt can be found in [the collection](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2017).  
>  ~~Competition winners are chosen by the readers, so please rate this fic using[this survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7io47TdV_3wF1NSybqDG0pyzwCNqBwIK5WjtNDGii71zhCQ/viewform?usp=sf_link%20%E2%80%A6)!~~ thank you to everyone who voted!

_Fall out of a winter sky at dusk, through purple on red on gold. There’s a city below—concrete and steel reaching for the clouds, a river that holds a slice of the sunset—Seoul, South Korea._

_Fall and fall and fall, watch as the microscopic streets become threads, become ribbons, become rivers big enough to swallow you and slip through the roof of a car, into the backseat._

_There’s a girl in a uniform in the passenger seat and a woman, her mother, with her hands resting on the steering wheel. The car isn’t moving, locked in peak-hour traffic._

_“–soon, I’m gonna miss it,” the girl is saying. She twists the tuning knob on the radio._

_Static fills the car, then a man’s voice, “–question is from one of our viewers. ‘Where do the members of Red Velvet see themselves in ten years?’”_

_“Ah, there,” the girl says, leaning back in her seat, “found it.” The car crawls forward half a metre._

_“For me, I think I’ll be–” The SUV beside the car blares its horn._

_“Good one,” the girl’s mother mutters, “that’ll help.”_

_“–together for a long time, I would like that a lot,” the woman on the radio is saying._

_“Thank you, Irene-ssi,” the man says. “Joy-ssi, what about you?”_

_“It might take longer than ten years,” Joy says, “but one day in the future I want to open a puppy school.”_

_“In ten years I want to be a student at Joy-unnie’s puppy school!” a different girl says, and several people laugh. The girl in the front seat types out a message to her friend that reads ‘so cute yerimmie TT’. The car rolls forward another few metres, closer to the intersection where the light has just turned red._

_“And what about you, Seulgi-ssi?” the man says, once the studio is quiet again. “Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”_

_A moment of silence, then a woman, Seulgi, speaks. “Honestly?” she says, “I really don’t know.”_

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### March, 2016

Seulgi has this memory she always goes back to when she can’t sleep, which is most of the time. The edges are fuzzy and well-worn, indistinct shapes of light, and then everything snaps into focus and Baekhyun is standing in a corridor in front of her, half his face in shadow and half in moonlight.

“–all right?” Baekhyun’s saying. He leans forward a little. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He blinks, looking down at his body. “Wait, am I…”

Seulgi smiles a little. “Nope,” she says, “alive and well,” but if she’s honest he really could be a ghost with how grey he looks beneath the blue of the light, how deeply the shadows catch in the circles beneath his eyes. If she opened the big windows at the end of the corridor she’s half-sure the wind would sweep him out into the night. “I’m just– nervous, I guess.”

Baekhyun leans back with a little _ah_ of understanding. “Is that tonight? Sorry, I did know, but…” He pulls up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and angles the face of his watch to the moon so he can read it. “Not long to go now. Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she says faintly. He smells like cigarette smoke. Seulgi wonders what he’d say if she asked for one. She wonders what she’d do if he actually gave her one.

Baekhyun looks at her face, then over her shoulder at the light spilling out of a door at the other end of the corridor. It’s the only room lit on this entire floor. “Needed some air?”

“Yeah.” Seulgi wraps her arms around herself and looks down at her feet. The bottom half of her hair is bright yellow. She hopes Baekhyun doesn’t notice because honestly she’s always hated yellow.

When she looks back up Baekhyun’s face is a lot softer than she remembers it. “I can go, if you want to be alone.”

She did want to be alone, that’s why she came out here, but now that he’s here she’s not quite sure what she wants. Maybe she didn’t want to be alone so much as she wanted to get away from that room, where it was far too bright and everyone had their future riding on the same three minutes and forty-nine seconds.

“No,” she says finally, “stay.”

Baekhyun turns to rest his back against the wall and says, “Okay.” She stays standing in the middle of the corridor, her back to the light. “Hey, if it makes you feel any better, you’re doing way better than me. I had my head in the toilet from about ten pm.”

She laughs a little, despite herself. “Any tips?”

Baekhyun goes quiet for a while, looking at the spot on the opposite wall where it joins the floor. “Do you want what I should tell you, or do you want the truth?”

No one lasts seven years as a trainee in SM without being a little idealistic, which is why Seulgi says, almost at once, “The truth.”

Baekhyun’s sneakers slip on the carpet and he slides down the wall a few inches. It brings the two of them almost eye-to-eye. “Debut is the easiest part. It’ll only get harder from here.” He fiddles with his sleeves, then looks up at her. “You know what I mean, right?”

She does. She would need to live under a rock to miss the year Baekhyun’s had, and she hadn’t been. She’d been living in the SM Entertainment building where the celebrity conduct classes had spread out his mistakes for the rest of them to inspect and said, _see kids, this is how you’ll end up if you don’t do exactly as we say_.

She stares out the window even though there’s nothing to see except another empty office building, because his exhaustion is suddenly hard to look at. “What if I can’t do it?” she says finally.

“What if you can? You’ll never know if you give up now.”

“But what if I _can’t_?” She’s whispering, because she’s spent enough years living in dorms to know how well sound travels through empty buildings at night. “What if I’m too scared to try?”

Baekhyun looks at her for so long she almost wonders if he’s turned to stone. “Well,” he says finally, “I guess that means you’ve got a choice to make, don’t you?”

“Seulgi!” Joohyun is calling from behind her. “Come on, one minute to go.”

“And here it comes now,” Baekhyun murmurs, pushing off the wall. “Good luck.” He smiles at her, a slash of white in the dark, then pulls up his hood and walks away, back the way he came.

She looks back at Joohyun, leaning out the open door of the practice room, light falling out into the dark all around her. Seulgi starts walking towards her, stops, turns in place, says, “Wait, Baekhyun-oppa, I–” then cuts off, because the hallway behind her is empty and dark.

“Was that Baekhyun?” Joohyun says, as Seulgi blinks against the light in the practice room. Seungwan and Sooyoung are on the floor hunched over a laptop. Sooyoung is pressing refresh every two seconds. “What did he want?”

“Nothing–” Seulgi starts to say, and then the room becomes shapes, which become colours, which become light, which becomes the wall of the living room, dawn painting blocks of new sun onto it.

“Hey,” Seungwan says, coming out of the bedroom, rubbing one eye with the heel of her palm. “You’re up early.”

And Seulgi stands up and goes to the window and says, “Yeah, I had an early night,” and as she stares over the shapes of Seoul dwarfed by the sunrise she wonders what time it is in Malaysia, and whether Baekhyun has slept yet.

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### April, 2016

Baekhyun won’t stop flicking his lighter. She’s been ignoring it for the past half an hour but it’s so quiet up here, above the city, that there’s nothing to do but listen to it. It’s too bright in Seoul to see the stars. Maybe that’s why he’s doing it; to cup a little warmth and light in his hand for a moment before it goes out again.

Or maybe it’s because of the packet of cigarettes he has on him somewhere—the left pocket of his jeans, probably, because he keeps running his hand over it—opened but full.

Seulgi holds out her hand, wordless. Baekhyun sighs and drops the lighter in her palm. She puts it in the pocket of her sweatshirt, hand curled around it. The metal is warm.

Baekhyun starts fidgeting once his hands are empty, rocking back in his chair and tapping on the balcony railing and peering over the edge at the dark, distant streets. Seulgi thinks he looks a little lost. She thinks he looks like that a lot of the time, just most people don’t know when or where or how to look for it.

An example: Halloween last year. Around midnight Seulgi found herself in the cloak room, sitting in one of the alcoves where the coats hang, head just beneath the railing. There weren’t any coats because most people were in costume, but Taemin’s black Howl wig was screwed up on the floor like some kind of bizarre roadkill.

The door opened, a slice of light cutting into the darkness like a searchlight. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t realise there was anyone...” someone said, but Seulgi could only see a silhouette. “Oh, hey,” they said, and then stepped into the darkness.

“Baekhyun-oppa,” Seulgi said, sitting up, “hi.”

“Boy, am I glad to see you,” said Baekhyun, leaning back to click the door shut behind him. “For a second there I thought we were going to have a repeat of last year.”

The story goes that at last year’s Halloween party Sunyoung had gone into an empty stairwell looking for Amber and had instead found Minho and Joohyun. She had come back to the party and promptly told everyone who’d listen. It’s still a legend though; Minho for once has nothing to say and Joohyun goes selectively deaf every time they bring it up, though her cheeks go a violent shade of red. Sooyoung and Yerim make a point of doing so often.

“Nope,” Seulgi said, “just me.” It wasn’t that she was anti-social, it was just– it could be a lot, when the whole company got together like this. Sometimes she needed a few minutes alone so she didn’t get lost in all that noise.

“Mind if I share your hiding place for a while?” Baekhyun asked, picking at a thread on the pillow tucked beneath his arm. She wasn’t sure whether he was in costume or just came in his pajamas for the hell of it.

In response, Seulgi scooted over and patted floor beside her.

“Thanks,” said Baekhyun. He lowered himself to sit cross-legged. “I’ll leave soon, I just need a moment to…” His expression twisted like he’d just swallowed something bitter. “Y’know how people always say not to date colleagues because you’ll still have to see each other after you break up? I should’ve listened.”

He was staring at the door, but Seulgi knew who he was thinking about. “Stay as long as you want,” she said. She tapped the baseball bat propped against the wall between them, part of her Harley Quinn costume. “I’m armed.”

He laughed a little. “Trade you?” He handed her the pillow on his lap and took the bat, running his fingertips along the grain of the wood. She wrapped her arms around her legs, pillow hugged between her knees and chest.

Baekhyun gripped the handle of the bat in both hands, testing the weight of it. He was looking down at it with the most serious expression, like he was considering hitting something with it—the wall maybe, or one of the closets—as hard as he could. Just to see which would break first, it or him.

Seulgi let her chin drop to rest in the pillow. It smelled like laundry detergent and hair product and below that something faint and warm that could only be Baekhyun’s aftershave.

He propped the bat back against the wall, the seriousness gone, but made no move to take his pillow back. Instead he reached into the breast pocket of his pajamas and pulled out a little silver flask. The sharp smell of spirits reached her when he unscrewed it.

He held it out to her. Seulgi shook her head. “I don’t really like to drink.”

Baekhyun pulled back his hand, thumbing at the mouth of the flask. “Wanna know a secret?” he asked, after thinking for a long moment.

“Okay,” Seulgi said, because from the forced calm in his voice she got the feeling that wasn’t something Baekhyun offered very often at all.

He tipped back the flask and took a gulp. Seulgi watched as the shadows in the curve of his throat shifted. He pressed his lips together tightly as the burn worked its way from the back of his tongue down to somewhere more vital. It was the same expression as when he’d stared at the closed door and thought of Taeyeon. “Neither do I.” 

_Lost_ , Seulgi had thought, then, _he looks so lost_. Maybe that’s why she can see it now—how Baekhyun always looks a little distant when it’s quiet—because she’d seen it at its most raw that night, halfway drunk and freshly heartbroken. Seulgi thinks he’s a little bit afraid of silence because he’s half-convinced that if he stops talking people will suddenly realise there’s no other reason to keep him around.

“An astronaut,” she says, abrupt in the silence, and Baekhyun turns to look at her, hyper-focused. “That was what I wanted to be when I was younger. Before I wanted to be this.”

Seulgi has always been fascinated by the stars. All that silence and open space, stretching out into forever. That was before she realised it was so cold out there her blood would freeze in her veins and that there was nothing for her to breathe. Before she realised that there are easier ways to reach the stars.

“Really?” Baekhyun says. He has twisted his whole body to face her. His presence is so large, even now when there’s no one to perform for but a sleeping city. All of him focused on her feels like far too much.

Seulgi grips the lighter in her pocket harder. “Well, when I was really little I wanted to be a hermit crab, but…”

Baekhyun leans back in his chair and laughs. The sound is swallowed by the night.

“What about you?” she asks, and she’s glad his smile has yet to fade because she doesn’t want to know what the look on his face might’ve been otherwise as he says, “This. For me, it’s always been this.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

Seulgi wakes to Baekhyun leaning over her. “Hey,” he’s whispering, “it’s morning, you gotta wake up,” but she’s looking over his shoulder at the sky, the palest shade of pink, like the first rosebud of spring.

There’s a knot in her back from falling asleep slumped in the chair. She sits up slowly, stretching it out. Baekhyun waits, looking over his shoulder at the single car that passes on the street below. 

She climbs off the balcony first. Baekhyun throws his backpack up to her once she’s back on the rooftop, then steps up onto the railing using one of the chairs. They’d found this spot a few months ago, one of the first few times Baekhyun messaged her, _hey, still awake?_ and she’d sent back, _of course TT_. 

They’re still not sure whether it was an architectural mistake or by design, but there’s a balcony on the top floor of Seulgi’s building with no door, just bare white wall on one side and open sky on all the others. The only way to get onto it is to climb over the railing of the rooftop and step across the half-metre of empty space separating the two, just wide enough for a person to slip through, and jump down.

Seulgi isn’t afraid of heights, but Baekhyun is. She can see it in his eyes now as he steps across the gap, suspended thirty storeys above the ground. 

His foot slips off the lower railing. Seulgi reaches out and grips onto his forearm, hard enough to bruise. He still has both hands on the rooftop railing and one foot wedged under it, more than enough to hold his weight, but as he pulls himself up so that they’re level she can tell from his face and the way her heart is beating so hard it hurts that for a moment there they both thought he was going to fall.

“Sorry,” he says, as he straddles the rooftop railing and drops down beside her, “you all right?”

She nods, but what she’s thinking about is that if Baekhyun really had fallen he’d probably still apologise on the way down, trusting the wind to carry his words back up to her.

That thought stays with her until she’s easing open the front door of the apartment and somewhere Baekhyun is sitting in early morning traffic on his way back to EXO’s dorm, and it’s only when Seulgi slips her hand into her pocket and her fingertips meet metal that she realises she still has Baekhyun’s lighter.

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### May, 2016

_Learned insomnia_ , is what they call it. _You’ve forced your body to stay awake longer than it should and now it’s forgotten that it’s allowed to sleep_.

“I’m calling bullshit,” says Baekhyun. He’s thinner than when she last saw him, weeks ago now, but his voice is just as loud.

Seulgi says, “You can’t call bullshit just because you don’t like what you’re hearing,” and Baekhyun throws a piece of unsalted popcorn at her. It bounces off her arm and lands somewhere between the couch cushions.

“I can and will,” says Baekhyun. His hair is dark red now, like a quiet fire. “But as it happens, this is not one of those times. My body is well aware of sleep, the traitorous bastard. I’m so tired right now I can’t even see straight.”

Seulgi’s never been anything more than moderately drunk. One night just before debut Seungwan had procured a bottle of red from lord knows where and the two of them piled into the bath behind the locked bathroom door, talking and drinking and pretending they weren’t fucking terrified. It had felt a little like this. 

She laughs and curls onto her side, away from the screen, her cheek pressed into the back of the couch. “I’m so tired the room is spinning.”

“I’m so tired that I could…” Baekhyun loses his train of thought. Seulgi starts digging for the piece of popcorn between the cushions.

“Don’t bother,” Baekhyun says. He’s looking down at his phone. There’s something hard in his face that Seulgi doesn’t like. “Worse things have been on these couches than popcorn.”

They’re at a little DVD-bang in a quiet neighbourhood. Normally they stick to private property, but EXO’s album is coming out next month and this is the last free time Baekhyun will have for a while.

“Like what?” she says immediately, then wishes she hadn’t. Seulgi’s not an idiot. She knows why most people come to DVD-bangs. There’s three years between her and Baekhyun and normally it doesn’t feel like much. As he glances at her sideways then back down, though, a faint quirk to his lips, she realises for the first time that while she signed herself away at thirteen, Baekhyun was twenty when he walked through SM’s doors for the first time. She hates how painfully young she feels when there’s a look on Baekhyun’s face that promises he’s dirtied a couch or two in his time.

Baekhyun, who’s been typing something on his phone for a while now, suddenly closes his eyes. Seulgi sees rather than hears him take a deep breath. He drops the phone in his lap and covers his face with his hands.

“Take it,” he mutters, muffled by his palms. “Please, before I do something I’ll regret.”

Seulgi hesitates, then grabs the phone off his thigh. Baekhyun doesn’t move, so she turns it over and reads the screen.

He’s drafting an Instagram post. To his public account, not the private one. The photo is one he must’ve taken moments ago, of the corner of the room. Baekhyun’s socked feet are visible, and so is an edge of the screen. It would take his fans maybe thirty seconds to realise that it was a Chinese movie Wu Yifan had a brief role in. Baekhyun had insisted they watch it just so he could throw pillows at the screen during Yifan’s ten-second appearance and yell, “You asshole! You could’ve at least called!”

The caption is only a few words. _Fuck you all_ , Baekhyun has written, _I loved her_.

Something in Seulgi’s chest twists. She deletes the draft, locks his phone and puts it on the armrest behind her. 

“Hey,” she whispers. Baekhyun’s hands twitch. “Baekhyun-oppa, hey,” she says again, nudging him with her knee. 

Baekhyun lets his hands drop from his face to his lap. His mouth is tense, and he won’t look at her. “Yeah?”

“Once you’ve cooled down a little I’m gonna give you your phone back.” Baekhyun’s expression is like stone under the shifting glow of the movie. Seulgi bites her lip and says, “You should call her.”

That gets a reaction, though what it is Seulgi isn’t quite sure. She thought she knew all his expressions, catalogued in her mind and her memory and, on nights when Baekhyun is busy or overseas, in a little sketchbook she keeps under her mattress where no one will find it.

His eyes move up carefully, deliberately, until they meet hers. Just then, the movie goes silent. Through one of the walls a woman moans, muffled and tender, fading away into a sigh. The look in Baekhyun’s eyes darkens but does not waver.

His lips part, and Seulgi finds herself staring. She feels dizzy and she doesn’t think it’s the fatigue. The only thing she can feel is the heat where his hip is resting against her knee. 

“Call her,” Seulgi says softly. It sounds like a challenge.

“I don’t think I want to,” murmurs Baekhyun. His eyes are dark and deep and full of things she doesn’t recognise. Seulgi should look away. 

She doesn’t.

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### July, 2016

There is one truth that Seulgi has learned in the past two years: there is no such thing as a secret.

Whenever they go abroad for SMTown concerts someone always charms their way into getting a picture of the hotel room assignments and sends it around until every second person has it saved on their phone. Historically it’s Kibum who does the charming, both because he’s frighteningly good at it and because he seems to thrive off the inevitable mess that is the morning after. This time they’re in Tokyo and it’s Sooyoung for, now that Seulgi thinks about it, probably the exact same reasons.

It’s nearing midnight when Seulgi leaves her assigned room. She walks down the corridor, hesitates beside one of the doors, then continues on past it toward the elevator. 

Case in point about secrets: when she answers the door to find Seulgi standing there Taeyeon looks surprised for a moment, then smiles and says, “I wondered when I’d be seeing you.” She steps aside. “Come in.”

“That’d better not be a guy, Kim Taeyeon,” someone calls from the bedroom. Seulgi rounds the corner, and Soonkyu says, “Oh, Seulgi. Hi. I’m think I’m gonna—” she gets up off the bed, “—go into the bathroom and make a very loud phone call.” She slips into the bathroom and closes the door behind her.

Seulgi stands uncertainly in the middle of the room as Taeyeon brushes past her. “Does _everyone_ know?”

“Everyone, no,” Taeyeon says, one corner of her mouth upturned. “Some people, yes. You forget that Baekhyun lives with eight other grown men, and one of them is Oh Sehun. Even if you keep it to yourselves there’s only so far privacy can go.”

“There’s no such thing as a secret,” Seulgi says. Seungwan once woke up as Seulgi was slipping out of the bedroom past midnight, and probably noticed when she never came back from the bathroom. Another time Sooyoung saw a message over her shoulder about getting late-night ramyun, and the next day the five of them passed Baekhyun in the halls and Seulgi must’ve greeted him a little too casually. That was all it had taken for them to work it out.

“Exactly.” Taeyeon sits on the second bed and pats the quilt across from her. Seulgi, still not sure exactly why she came here, perches on the edge.

“Do you want to say something first, or should I?” asks Taeyeon. The only light on is the bedside lamp. She’s wearing grey pajamas and her hair is loose around her shoulders, but in the soft yellow light Taeyeon looks older and more beautiful than Seulgi can ever imagine being.

“You start,” says Seulgi. Soonkyu must not have found anyone to call because she’s resorted to playing music loudly, an upbeat SHINee song Seulgi can’t remember the name of. Jonghyun is screaming. This whole situation feels very surreal.

Taeyeon takes a deep breath and says, “You can’t keep doing this with him.” 

Something cold and heavy sinks down through Seulgi’s chest even as she nods, eyes on the quilt, and says, “Okay.” 

If Seulgi were asked in an interview about her best quality, she would say loyalty. Taeyeon has been so fiercely protective of the five of them, like it’s her personal responsibility to shield them from the worst of the industry simply because there was no one around to do it for her. Maybe that’s why Seulgi came here tonight; out of loyalty. Maybe because a part of her knows that soon no one, not Taeyeon and maybe not even herself, will be able to put a stop to whatever this is between her and Baekhyun.

Taeyeon folds her legs up underneath her and says, “It’s not for the reason you think.”

Seulgi frowns. In her pocket, her phone starts vibrating against her leg. She ignores it. “Is he a bad person?”

Taeyeon smiles, soft and infinitely kind. She might be the closest thing to perfect Seulgi has ever seen. “You already know the answer to that.”

Baekhyun on the roof of a thirty-storey building, pure fear in his eyes but asking Seulgi if she’s okay. “Yeah,” she says, very quietly, “I do.”

“It’s not about him,” Taeyeon says slowly. There’s a crease between her eyebrows like she’s thinking very hard about what to say next. “And it’s not about me and him. It’s about you.”

The song changes. Baekhyun’s voice, sweet and sad, echoes out of the bathroom. Soonkyu calls out, “Shit, sorry!” There are fumbling sounds and then Baekhyun is gone, replaced by American pop.

“I…” Seulgi presses down on her thumbnail and glances down to watch the colour rush back into it. Her phone has stopped vibrating. “I don’t understand?” 

Taeyeon bites her lip, tucks her hair behind her ear. “How can I put this? Okay, here– why do you like being around him?” 

Seulgi looks up, startled. “I can’t– you two were…”

“It’s okay,” says Taeyeon. “I think we both realised that we were always better as friends.”

Seulgi digs her nails hard into her palm. “He loved you so much.”

Taeyeon looks down, then out the window where Tokyo is glowing up into the night. “I know.” She looks back at Seulgi. “But he doesn’t anymore, and neither do I.”

Seulgi chews on her lower lip. The makeup artists will be upset with her tomorrow. “Are you sure?”

“I am,” Taeyeon says. “Of course, at first we both still…” She pauses, tries again. “These things take a while to heal. And it has. But more than that, he was angry about the way it all happened. He probably still is. The media, the fans, all of that…” In the bathroom, one of Taeyeon’s songs comes on. Her face flickers, closes off, out of reflex more than choice. For just a moment she is Taeyeon, leader of Girls’ Generation, and then it’s gone and she is Kim Taeyeon, the twenty-seven year old woman who is talking to a girl she loves like a sister about a man she no longer loves at all. “It was tough for both of us. But that doesn’t mean we should’ve kept going when we started drifting apart. We both know that.”

Seulgi doesn’t know what to say to that. Mostly she just feels very young and very out of her depth, alone in this room with a woman who has been in love and let it go.

Taeyeon shuffles on the bed, pulls a pillow onto her lap. “So you can tell me, if you want to.” She gives Seulgi a knowing little smile. “It’s okay, I understand better than most people how easy he is to love.”

“I…” Seulgi says, “okay.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Imagines Baekhyun is here right now and he’s singing loudly in the bathroom, or by the window, or he’s sitting beside her on the bed and the mattress is bouncing a little because he can’t keep still to save his life. “He’s… somehow he always seems to understand how I feel. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel–” _safe. He makes me forget how scared I am_. Then quietly, from a corner of her mind that she rarely touches, _What am I so scared of?_

When Seulgi opens her eyes, Taeyeon is smiling sadly at her. “You’ll understand what I mean one day. I just hope it’s not too late.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

Baekhyun only has one rule in his car: between the hours of one and seven in the morning the only music that plays is jazz. He says it’s because it makes it feel less like fuck o’clock in the morning. Seulgi says it’s because the later it gets the more his pretentious side comes out.

She can already hear it when she walks up to the car, even over the idling engine. The door is unlocked when she tries the handle and slips into the passenger seat. 

Baekhyun is humming along to a saxophone solo. “Hey,” he says, taking the car out of park. He glances over at her as he guides the car out of the underground parking lot. “Where to?”

The fluorescents passing overhead make light pulse slowly over everything in the car. Baekhyun has one hand on the steering wheel, thumb idly tapping to the beat. It’s warm enough tonight that he’s only wearing a t-shirt. His skin is shades of gold beneath the shifting light.

Baekhyun looks at her again as the barrier lifts, properly this time. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Seulgi says. His hair is damp, like he came here straight out of the shower. A drop of water rolls down the back of his neck and disappears beneath the collar of his t-shirt.

“Good.” Baekhyun looks ahead again and guides the car up the slope toward the street. His profile against the streetlights looks like something out of a dream. “Left or right?”

“I don’t care,” Seulgi hears herself say, like she’s speaking underwater. A new song comes on. Baekhyun pulls out onto the street, but Seulgi doesn’t know which direction. An American woman croons in her upper register. Baekhyun matches her note for note.

_Oh,_ Seulgi thinks distantly. Her heart is pounding so hard she can feel it in her fingertips. The only thing she can hear over it is Baekhyun’s voice, like honey, sweet and thick. The only thing she can see is the smile in the corners of his eyes when he shoots for a note, one finger pointing to the sky, and misses. The only thing she can feel is a swoop in the very bottom of her stomach, like she’s falling. _Oh._

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### August, 2016

Joohyun is waiting the next time she slips out of the bedroom, pulling on a sweatshirt over her pajama top. When she looks up and sees Seulgi she takes off her glasses and closes her laptop, puts both aside on the couch, and waits.

Seulgi knows she could walk out the door without a word and Joohyun wouldn’t stop her. She’s never once pulled rank on Seulgi. But they’ve known each other for seven years, and Joohyun was there long before any of the others. If it weren't for her Seulgi thinks she might have turned out a little more like Baekhyun—scared to death of people leaving her because she knows what it’s like to be very lonely for a very long time. 

It's out of loyalty again that Seulgi slips her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and sits on the arm of the couch. 

“If it was anyone else,” Joohyun begins, “if it was anyone but you doing this I’d be angry. But I know that this—” she gestures around them, but Seulgi knows she isn't talking about the apartment; she’s talking about their dream, “—this means even more to you than it does to me.” Joohyun looks very small and very tired. Seulgi wonders what she looks like. “I don't understand why you're risking everything. It isn’t like you.”

Seulgi pulls her sleeves down over her hands. “Isn’t it?” she says, looking up. “I was thirteen when I signed. All I know how to be is what they’ve taught me.”

Joohyun shakes her head. “No,” she says, quiet but certain. “That girl who slept in studios so she wouldn’t lose practice time. The one who stayed for seven years for her dream. You can’t fake that.”

“She was an idiot,” says Seulgi, the strength of it surprising even herself. “She didn’t realise…”

Joohyun sighs and folds her hands in her lap. “Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I am going to tell you the truth: you can’t have both.” 

She’s right. There is no such thing as a secret; eventually someone somewhere will find out. It wouldn’t even matter that for all intents and purposes she and Baekhyun are nothing but friends—one picture would be evidence enough. Seulgi can’t even bring up Minho in defence. For one she’s not that petty, but even so Minho is not Baekhyun. Minho is not a member of EXO. Minho has never publicly dated a member of Girls’ Generation.

“I…” Seulgi’s phone vibrates once in her back pocket. “I need to go.”

Joohyun slips her glasses back onto her face. “Then go.” She pulls her laptop back onto her thighs and opens it so that she doesn’t have to look at Seulgi as she says the next words. “But remember: the dream that you’re risking isn’t just yours.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

Baekhyun is alone when he answers the door. Seulgi knew he would be; he’s sharing with Chanyeol, who was seen half an hour ago hitting Osaka’s club scene with a Japanese DJ Kibum introduced him to. 

What she hadn’t known was how terrible he would look. He breaks into a tired smile when he sees her standing there. “Hey,” he says, stepping aside and holding the door so she can slip past him into the hotel room. 

Baekhyun follows her in and drops onto one of the beds, shuffling back against the headboard, most likely where he’d been when she knocked. Seulgi pulls out the chair at the desk and sits in it. 

“You hungry?” Baekhyun asks her, after a pause. “I could go out and get us some food.”

Seulgi swivels back and forth in the chair, pushing off the desk at one end and stretching out her leg to kick off the bed at the other. “I’m fine. And no, you couldn’t.” Baekhyun can’t really go anywhere easily, not without leaving the continent of Asia first. 

“You’re probably right,” he admits. “We could order room service instead. Or watch one of those pay-per-view movies.”

“Baekhyun-oppa,” Seulgi says.

“Let’s do both,” he says, sitting up to search for the remote, or the room-service menu. “Chanyeol already billed the extra expenses to his card so he could raid the mini-bar.”

EXO’s repackage is coming out in less than a week. The nine of them have been cooped up together for the past god knows how long in the brutal pre-promotional grind of dorm, van, practice room, repeat. 

Seulgi doesn’t know this because she’s been told, she knows because Baekhyun sees it as his personal responsibility to keep tensions between all of them under control. She knows because Baekhyun looks like he’s ready to collapse from exhaustion, yet hasn’t stopped talking since she walked in. 

“Baekhyun-oppa,” she says again, reaching out and grazing the back of his shirt as he walks by her to get to the phone on the desk. “You’re allowed to stop, you know.” Some of the tension leaves the line of his mouth. “I’m not them. You don’t need to keep me happy.”

His hands still, and then come to rest flat on the desk. The curve of his shoulders heaves up and down as he takes a deep breath. Seulgi swings around in her chair and her knee comes to rest against the back of his legs. She doesn’t push away.

“Sometimes,” Baekhyun says, staring down at the desk, unseeing. “Sometimes when you say things like that, I almost wish…”

Seulgi watched from the wings earlier today when EXO performed. That Baekhyun, the one magnified a thousand times and projected up on screen, was like a star; explosive and untouchable. It was easy to watch him out there and want him. In that arena she was just one amongst thousands of others doing the same.

This Baekhyun, though, the one in a faded Supreme t-shirt and sweatpants, the one so tired he can barely stand, is so painfully real. She can see the shadow on his chin where he needs to shave. She can feel the muscles in his thigh shift as he pushes off the desk and walks over to the window, the movement spinning her chair.

Baekhyun rests his forehead against the glass. The chair comes to rest facing him. Seulgi watches his back, motionless against the traffic ticking by in tiny beads of orange light. If she looks harder she can see his reflection, and beyond it the lit interior of the hotel room: the beds, the sharp points of light on the ceiling, the small shadow off to one side that Seulgi knows is her. 

The rest of the world could drop out of existence right now and Seulgi wouldn’t notice, as long as those lights kept shining and she and Baekhyun were here in this hotel room. If the two of them went to space Seulgi imagines it would feel a lot like this.

She pushes out of the chair and goes to the window too, making it two silhouettes against the city lights, one half a head shorter than the other. She hesitates only for a moment before she slides her right hand into Baekhyun’s left. He exhales, fogging the glass.

Minutes pass. Seulgi asks, quieter than the last rain of the season, “You almost wish what?”

Slowly, slowly, like he’s coming out of a dream, Baekhyun turns away from the window to face her. He bring his free hand up, his palm sliding against her cheek. His hand is trembling. Seulgi closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again because suddenly it’s important that she see Baekhyun’s face.

She was wrong; the world was not out in Osaka’s lights or in this hotel room. It’s here, all of it is here in the tenderness, the _longing_ in Baekhyun’s eyes, the gravity of it stronger than any she’s ever felt.

“Me too,” Seulgi says, softer than the glow of the most distant star.

Baekhyun stares into her eyes for one more moment, like he’s looking for something. He must find it. He slips his hand out of hers, releases her cheek with the other, reaches out to grab handfuls of the curtains and yanks them closed.

And then he’s kissing her and the secret star in her chest ignites, and everything turns to heat and light.

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### September, 2016

August passes in a blur. Red Velvet’s comeback is scheduled for early September and Seulgi sees more of the inside of the dance studio than anywhere else. Summer fades to autumn almost overnight, and she sometimes finds herself going out in a t-shirt and remembering only when she starts to shiver.

She wipes a hand over the condensation on the bathroom mirror. Her hair is violent orange and she still flinches every time she sees it, for that split second she’s unable to connect the girl in the mirror and herself. No one is knocking at the door for their turn because she showered last. Seulgi grips onto the basin with both hands and stares at her reflection.

There’s something that’s been bothering her ever since Tokyo, when she spoke to Taeyeon—no, since before then, she just didn’t have the words for it yet.

_What am I so scared of?_

Somehow, this is at the heart of everything: of the sleepless nights and the recklessness and how she’s not herself these days, of Baekhyun.

Maybe he’s as good a place as any to start. She thinks back to the beginning—before the insomnia, before the cloak room on Halloween, before that night in the corridor. Back to the June before that, when Dispatch released those pictures of Taeyeon and Baekhyun. 

Seulgi was still a trainee, but she’d signed the contracts and Red Velvet already existed in all but name. The collective internet meltdown that followed the news was immense. Seulgi followed it and watched as Taeyeon, who she admired since the day she started training, her idol in every sense of the word, was torn to pieces. Baekhyun didn’t fare well either, but for the most part it was his fans—Baekhyun, who was five years Taeyeon’s industry junior—attacking her.

And it was easier for Seulgi to attribute that slow burn of unease in her gut to the fact that Baekhyun was even more handsome in person and had always been so nice to her than to look at Taeyeon and see herself.

Fast-forward to that night in the corridor when _Happiness_ came out, the one Seulgi always thinks back to when she can’t sleep. Maybe she does that because thinking of Baekhyun and moonlight and the quiet way he’d talked the nerves out of her is infinitely easier than thinking of the hours that followed, when she was curled up around her phone beneath the sheets. 

At first she’d scrolled through comments, and when that became too much she opened a new tab and started searching university entrance requirements. What was seven years of her life compared to thousands of people telling the company to disband them? And not for anything she’d done, but for the mistake of some editor she’d never met who didn’t have the common sense to keep real headlines about real people dying out of a music video.

The video was fixed and reuploaded. The company assured them it would blow over, and it did. But Seulgi never quite forgot that feeling of watching her dream go up in smoke because of forces entirely out of her control. She never forgot watching it happen to Taeyeon and realising that it didn't matter how hard she worked or how good she was, there’d always be someone taking her place eventually. A part of her must’ve thought, must still think, _If I end it myself then I’ll never have to feel that way again._

The mirror has fogged over again. Seulgi doesn’t wipe it away. She’s thinking about the first time she and Baekhyun went up to the rooftop, when Seulgi had looked over the edge and said, “Hey, is that a balcony down there?”

Seulgi climbed down first, and only when she looked back did she notice how white Baekhyun’s face was in the diffused moonlight.

She tipped back her head to look at him and said, “Are you scared?”

“Shitless,” Baekhyun called down. He started taking off his gloves. “But you know what the best way to beat fear is?”

“What’s that?” Seulgi asked, and Baekhyun pushed up onto the railing, kicked one leg over and said, “Face it head on.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### October, 2016

The closest thing to a secret that Seulgi can think of is what Seungwan told her as they passed the bottle of wine back and forth in the bathtub, stripped down to their underwear.

She said, “I’ve never told anyone this before so you can’t laugh, okay?” 

Seulgi didn’t laugh, but her hand found Seungwan’s beneath the surface of the soapy water and squeezed. As far as she knows Seungwan hasn’t told anyone since except Amber, who knows by default because it’d be impossible for her to miss the way Seungwan looks at her.

That’s why it’s to Seungwan that Seulgi says, in the van on they way home from their last _Russian Roulette_ stage, “Hey, what if…”

The others are sleeping and it’s only the two of them in the backseat. The highway blurs as Seungwan looks up from her phone. “Yeah?”

“What if…” The words won’t come. Seulgi bites her lip. “Never mind.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

_What if I love him?_

_“Well,”_ comes Baekhyun’s voice, made of moonlight and smoke, _“I guess that means you’ve got a choice to make, don’t you?”_

Seulgi’s phone lights up the dark and turns everything grey, like the whole bedroom is underwater. She knows who the message is from without even looking.

His voice is so close she can almost feel his lips against the back of her neck. Seulgi lets her head fall back against the wall and closes her eyes. 

_“And here it comes now.”_

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### November, 2016

Her hair is brown now, so she takes the train. The Ansan line at midday on a Tuesday is mostly pensioners and mothers with strollers that don’t give the young woman in jeans and dark sunglasses a second glance.

It’s been months since Seulgi’s been back home. Her parents and brother are at work, so she has to let herself in with her key, the one she’s had since middle school and that now collects dust in the bottom of her sock drawer.

It echoes as she shuts the door and takes off her shoes. She drops her bag in the corridor and goes into the kitchen, where it still smells of freshly cooked rice from this morning. She wonders if she should do the dishes in the sink or if that would be weird.

She sits at one of the bar stools and pulls out her phone, then has to hunt around for the wifi password. Sometime in the last few months they must have finally replaced the shitty old router they’ve had for years. Seulgi feels… not sad, exactly, but a little wistful that things here have changed without her knowing.

Her bedroom is just how she remembers it, though. The mattress is folded up in the wardrobe and she can’t be bothered getting it out so she sits on the floorboards, back against the wall. It’s so quiet that she can hear the clock in the living room ticking. There are little stripes of light leaking through the blinds and patterning the floor. It feels oddly like she’s a teenager again, and she’s skipped class to come home early or faked being sick to get the day off.

She crawls over to the window on her knees and tugs the cord to pull up the blinds. It throws up specks of dust, spinning into the air and catching the afternoon sunlight. Seulgi squints and leans back on her hands until they settle.

On the windowsill is a row of shells, five of them, ordered from smallest to largest. She runs a fingertip over one. The smooth surface is thick with dust. She’d collected them on a trip to the beach when she was much younger, maybe seven or eight years old.

She’d been searching the shoreline for one big enough for her to crawl into, so she could curl up in it and stay there forever.

“You know hermit crabs change shells, right?” her brother asked, crouching beside her on the sand to help her look. “They don’t stay in one forever.”

Seulgi looked up at him, aghast. “They do so! You're lying.”

Her brother held up his hands. “I’m not! You can ask Mom and Dad.”

Seulgi looked back down, scrunching the wet sand in her hands and letting it fall. “But can't they just stay in there? It's safe, why would they ever leave?”

“Because,” he said, sifting carefully through a pile of seaweed, “they want to. They outgrow their shells. When it’s time to move on they find a bigger one, so they can grow even more.” He plucked a perfect shell out of a clump of seaweed and held it out to her, and she took it with both hands.

Seulgi picks up the middle shell and rubs away the dust with her sleeve. It’s small enough that she can almost close her fist over it when she tries. She remembers she was holding one, the second smallest, when the phone call came from the company that they were offering her a place.

She’d run her thumb over the dips and ridges in the shell that night and said, “But Mom, what if I miss my friends too much?”

Her mother had folded her knees beneath her and hummed in thought. “Well, how about you look at it this way?” she said. “You’ve got an opportunity that not many people get. If you don’t take it now then it probably won’t come back.” Seulgi clutched the shell to her chest beneath the covers. “But,” her mom continued, “you know what will always be there?”

Seulgi rolled onto her side, cheek pressed into the pillow, and said, “What?”

“Your friends,” her mom said. “People change, but they never really leave. Remember that.”

The sound of the front door opening and footsteps shuffling in. The door clicks shut. Someone calls out, “Seulgi, is that you?”

Seulgi sets the shell back in place on the windowsill and gets to her feet. “Yeah,” she calls as she walks out of the bedroom. “It’s me.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

#### December, 2016

The snow has come early this year. Flakes of it keep landing on the windshield and melting away into water because Baekhyun keeps the heating up so high. They’re parked by an empty field—a high school, maybe. There’s a grove of thick trees outside Baekhyun’s window and deserted shopfronts by Seulgi’s.

Baekhyun swiped a whole box of cereal and a half-full carton of milk from the kitchen before coming, made it halfway across town and then realised he’d forgotten everything else. She wonders what the tabloids would make of it if they knew they were eating EXO’s cereal out of Red Velvet’s bowls.

“Oh,” says Seulgi, balancing her spoon across the lip of her bowl so she can reach into her pocket. “I keep forgetting. This is yours.” She pulls out Baekhyun’s lighter and holds it out to him.

“Mmm,” says Baekhyun, mouth full. He drops it in his lap then swallows. “Thanks. I forgot too.”

The sky had been clear this morning, but around dusk it started snowing and now it’s getting heavier by the minute. The footpaths are white, and so is the grass and the trees and all of the road except for lines of tire tracks. When Seulgi presses her cheek to the window and looks up she can see thousands of specks of white coming down out of the blackest sky.

Seulgi picks up her spoon, puts it down again, then sets the whole bowl aside on the dashboard. “Baekhyun-oppa,” she says, looking out the windscreen then down at her lap. “I think I’m done.”

Baekhyun’s expression doesn’t change. He keeps chewing, looking straight down at his bowl. Seulgi would think he hadn’t heard her if it weren’t for his grip on the spoon suddenly going white-knuckled. He swallows, then says, “You don’t mean the cereal, do you?”

“No,” says Seulgi, “I don’t.” She wants to reach out and put her hand over Baekhyun’s so he’ll loosen his grip a little, but she’s not that cruel.

Baekhyun sucks in a deep breath of air through his teeth, then lets it out. “All right.” He nods once, a few times, putting his bowl up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. “Okay, all right. Excuse me for a minute.” And then he opens his door and the winter rushes in, so cold it takes Seulgi’s breath away. 

The door slams shut and Baekhyun is gone. She can see his back retreating toward the trees. He’s only wearing a sweatshirt, and it’s unzipped. Seulgi crawls across the car to put both hands on the driver’s seat, warm from where Baekhyun had just been. “What are you doing?” she yells. “Get back in the car!”

He doesn’t respond. She winds down the window a few inches down and shouts his name again. Baekhyun half-turns as he walks, makes a vague movement with his hand that probably means _don’t worry_ or _stay there_. He turns around and keeps walking.

“Christ,” Seulgi mutters, scrambling back to her side of the car and pulling her coat on from where she’d draped it around the back of her seat.

The cold bites at her when she opens the door. She slams it and hugs her coat around her as she rounds the front of the car. The wind tugs at her hair, her coat, anything it can reach.

“Baekhyun-oppa!” she shouts, when she catches sight of him stopped by a tall pine. “What are you doing? You’ll freeze!”

She’s almost reached him when suddenly Baekhyun tips his head back and screams. She grabs onto his arm just as he stops and says, “What on earth are you doing? Come back to the car.” Something drops out of Baekhyun’s fist to the ground—his lighter. Neither of them pick it up.

Baekhyun tips his head back to squint up at the sky, snowflakes caught in his hair. “Don’t you ever just feel like screaming? Go on, try it.”

Seulgi glances around and tugs on his sleeve. “Come on, we’ll be seen. Please come back to the car.”

Baekhyun shrugs then screams again, bending over at the waist from the force of it. It tapers off into a laugh at the end. The wind whistles along with him.

“I can’t believe I’ve never done this before,” he says, a little breathless. His cheeks are bright red. “Come on, you’ve gotta try.”

Seulgi frowns, but Baekhyun is watching her expectantly and she has just broken his heart. She lifts her chin and yells, so half-heartedly that it sets Baekhyun off again and he’s laughing so hard he has to put his hands on his knees to hold himself up.

“You’ve gotta mean it,” Baekhyun says, wiping his eyes. He’s shivering so hard his jaw keeps clenching, but he throws his arms out to the sides and screams to the sky again, the loudest yet.

“I have to mean it?” Seulgi asks, and Baekhyun nods. Seulgi takes a deep breath. She cups her hands around her mouth, rocks back on her heels and yells Baekhyun’s name, holding each syllable until she runs out of breath. By the time she’s finished she’s laughing too.

Baekhyun is staring at her when she turns to him, fond and frozen and a little sad. “Yeah,” he says. “Like that.”

Seulgi steps in front of him so that they’re face to face. “My Mom told me something important once,” she says, fumbling with the zipper of his sweatshirt with numb fingers. “And now I’m gonna tell you.” She gets a grip and pulls it all the way up to his chin, then lets her hands drop back to her sides. “People change, but they never really leave.” 

Baekhyun is so cold his lips are going blue. Seulgi would give him her coat if she thought he would take it. “Your Mom sounds like a smart lady.”

“She is,” Seulgi says. And then, “I’m really sorry, Baekhyun-oppa.”

“I know,” Baekhyun says, solemn in a way he seldom is. He kicks at the fresh snow with the toe of his shoe. “So am I.” 

Seulgi knows what he means. He’s sorry that they can’t walk together by the river at sunset. He’s sorry that they can’t hold hands in public. He’s sorry he can’t take her out to a fancy restaurant or introduce her to his friends or hold her backstage when she’s nervous. He’s sorry he can’t come over to her family’s apartment in Ansan for dinner and win over her Dad by making Seulgi laugh at the table, and talk sports with her brother, and make her Mom blush by telling her that Seulgi’s always repeating wise things her mother once told her.

He’s sorry that in the hotel room in Osaka, when he started to say _I wish I wasn’t famous, so I could be yours instead_ , what he actually said was _almost_. It’s Seulgi who’s walking away first, but Baekhyun’s sorry because if she hadn’t then one day he would have. 

The two of them are so alike in so many ways and this is one of them; heart before head every time. The only thing is, Seulgi fell in love with the stage long before she did with Byun Baekhyun. He’s sorry because even though everything’s better when they’re together, if it came down to it, which it would have eventually, he probably wouldn’t have chosen her either.

Seulgi will not cry, even though she is in love and she is letting it go. If she cries then Baekhyun will too, and she doesn’t want him to cry because he might be the best person she has ever known.

“People change, but they never really leave,” Baekhyun repeats slowly, eyes fixed on a point near her jaw like he’s turning the words over in his mind.

“It’s not a promise,” Seulgi says, wrapping her arms around her waist. It’s so cold out here. “I can’t give you that, and you can’t give it to me either. But it’s important that you know, so that you know I’m not…” She stops, bites her lip, tries again. “I had to choose, so I did. But I’m not abandoning you. I’m not leaving you forever.”

Baekhyun closes his eyes, like he’s taking a moment to commit her words to memory so that he can play them back at will. Seulgi closes her eyes too. The wind has died down, and it’s so quiet she can hear Baekhyun’s breathing, the way it shudders because he’s shivering so hard. They are standing close enough that Seulgi can feel the heat radiating off his body, but then again maybe she’s just imagining it because she knows that he’s there and that he’s so very warm.

When Seulgi opens her eyes Baekhyun is staring at her. She’s still so cold, but she’s not going to cry anymore. 

“Will you be okay?” she asks him.

Baekhyun smiles, a gentle curve of his lips. He never smiles like this for the camera, which is how Seulgi knows it’s real. “Yeah,” he says, “I think so.” Baekhyun wraps his arm around her shoulders and steers them back toward the road. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

 

 

~~~

 

 

Seulgi falls asleep and dreams. 

She doesn’t remember it when she wakes up, all it leaves behind is the vague impression of warmth and light and wide, open space. 

And only when that fades and she’s sitting up in bed does she realise that she just slept through the night for the first time in almost a year.

 

 

~~~

 

 

With the end of the year comes the inevitable wave of concerts and award shows.

It’s when Seulgi’s on stage that she can feel it the most clearly. When there’s an ocean of light spread out in front of her as far as she can see, when the screams are so loud all she can hear from her in-ear is the bass and she has to watch the others to make sure she’s in time. It’s then that she thinks, _yes, this is where I’m supposed to be_.

At the end of the night she sees him across the stage. His hair is gold and he is glowing. Baekhyun sees her too. He stops, and for a moment so does the world.

_Someday_ , Seulgi thinks, staring into his eyes as the earth’s orbit grinds to a halt. _Someday in spring the snow will melt. Someday, not this spring, nor the next, nor for many springs to come, I will go back there. I’ll have a car and a license and I’ll park nearby. I’ll walk in amongst the trees, get down on my hands and knees and search through the grass. My hair will be black and cut short, the way I’ve always wanted to try. There will be boys kicking a soccer ball nearby but they won’t notice me._

_I’ll look up and you will be standing there. Your hands will be in your pockets and the wind will be in your hair. One of the boys will say, “Hey, does that guy over there look familiar to you?” The other will reply, “He kind of looks like that newsreader from SBS. The one your sister likes.” They will keep kicking the ball._

_You won’t say anything, but you’ll get on your knees and help me look. We never find your lighter, but we walk away together. I drive us out of the city far enough to see the stars, and we laugh about how much things have changed and how much they are the same._

The world keeps spinning. Between them the stage comes alive again with movement and noise. Baekhyun smiles at her, small and secret and a little bit like goodbye. Seulgi thinks about the shell she keeps beside her bed to remind her of all the places she’s been and all the places she has yet to go, and smiles back.

Someday Seulgi will stand on a stage for the last time, and on that day she will be ready. 

But today is not that day. 

Seulgi turns to face the crowd, raises her microphone to her lips, and sings.

 

 

~~~

 

 

_“And what about you, Seulgi-ssi?” the man says, once the studio is quiet again. “Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”_

_A moment of silence, then a woman, Seulgi, speaks. “Honestly?” she says, “I really don’t know.”_

_The light goes green. The traffic around the car stirs. “But isn’t that the beauty of it?” she asks. The girl’s mother puts both hands on the steering wheel. “In ten years I could be doing anything. I could be anywhere. I could be anyone.”_

_The car accelerates and you tumble out the back windscreen. The traffic is moving through you. The girl and her mother are gone, but that’s okay. It is almost nightfall and the sky is calling you back._

_Soar up through a winter sky at dusk, through gold on red on purple. Watch as the streets that were rivers big enough to swallow you become ribbons, become threads, become microscopic._

_Soar up and up and up and slip into the space in the sky made just for you. Watch as the sun falls over the edge of the earth, then close your eyes and begin to shine._

**Author's Note:**

> The other 2 fics for this prompt can be found in [the collection](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2017). ~~Competition winners are chosen by the readers, so please rate this fic using[this survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7io47TdV_3wF1NSybqDG0pyzwCNqBwIK5WjtNDGii71zhCQ/viewform?usp=sf_link%20%E2%80%A6)!~~ thank you to everyone who voted!
> 
>  
> 
> even though this fic is pretty vague about when events actually happen, all the dates of comebacks, concerts, trips abroad etc are accurate! however specific interviews and details like hotels/dorms etc are all made up. ironically the only deliberate alteration to the canon is that the events that made me consider this pairing in the first place, namely the [sm super league that seulgi guested on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eOAHyOvY8) in november and the [skechers campaign](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSKKawkNFk) exo and rv did together which may or may not have been filmed during the timeline of the story, never happen because i couldn't find a way to work them into the plot oops
> 
> thank you for reading!


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